How Do We Win?

Probably one of the most important questions to sellers, at all levels is, “How do we win?” Probably a close second is, “Can we win enough to achieve our goals?” I’ve written extensively about the latter in my posts on win rates. But, the first question is more fundamental, “How do we win?”

Asking a random set of sellers, the answers were unsurprising. Most respond, “We have the best product!”  “It’s my superior sales ability!”

And when we lose, it’s because of our products, price, competition,  but never what we did as sellers. 

But winning (and losing) about so much more than what we sell or our “selling superiority.”  It’s not about how great our pitch was, the demo, how cleverly we handled objections, and our closing techniques.

While it may seem trite, our ability to win is wholly dependent on our ability to help our customers win!

And their win has very little to do with the product/solution they have selected.  In reality, any of their shortlist alternatives will solve their problem.

But there is so much more that stands in the way of the customers’ abilities to win.  And most of this is within their own organizations or themselves.

We have endless data about how customers struggle.  The majority end up in No Decision Made.  For those that do, we see a continued decline in what customers consider “High Quality Deals.”  In two years, according to Hank Barnes of Gartner, we see a decline of 10%.  Only 17% of customers reported their purchases qualified as High Quality Deals.

These are just a couple of data points, and there are many more.  But the issue is our customers are not winning!  And if they aren’t winning, we aren’t!

This brings us to two issues—How do we help our customers win, particularly if it has little to do with product selection?  And, Why do we care, we’re making our numbers anyway!

Let me address the second issue, “Why do we care, we are making our numbers anyway?”  At a corporate or organizational level, we may be hitting our revenue targets.  But we are probably underperfoming our potential–we could do so much more.  If 60% of our qualified deals go to no decision made, what can we do to win more of those deals?  If customers 87% of customers feel they haven’t made a high quality decision, how does this impact potential retention/renewal, upsell or expansion within an account?

Second, at an individual level, we are seeing constant declines in percent of people achieving their goals.

In each of these cases, our customers are failing and this failure adversely impacts our performance!

So, let’s get to the main question, How do we help our customers win?

We need to recognize where our customers struggle in their change, problem solving and buying processes.  Some thoughts–I won’t go deeply into each, but each is critical to helping our customers win:

1.  Recognizing the opportunity or need to change.   Like us, our customers are overwhelmed in their day jobs,  Often, they fail to recognize the opportunity to do things differently.  They may not be paying attention to changes in their markets, with their customers, their competitors.  They may be unaware of advances in technology, business processes.  They may not have the opportunity to learn from peers in different companies, industries.  Sellers can help customers/prospects recognize these.  Perhaps through insights, perhaps, introducing them to others, perhaps giving them articles or other forms of content (not necessarily from us).
2. Committing to the need to change.  Helping them understand the consequences of doing nothing, helping them understand the risks of the change.  Helping them understand the “cost” of the status quo is greater than the “costs” of change.
3. They don’t know what they don’t know.  It makes sense, after all, if they know those things, they probably would be embarked on a change initiative.  But even if they are, because they don’t do this every day, they may still not be asking the right questions.
4. Who else should be involved?  In complex B2B, the problems the customer is trying to address, impact many people in the organization.  It’s critical the customer identifies and engages those people in the process of solving those problems.  It’s this whole team that needs to be involved, it’s this whole team that’s needed to win.  But they probably don’t know this.
5. Then there’s the problem of aligning agendas, goals and priorities of these team members–and managing consensus through the whole process.
6. And since they aren’t experienced with this, it’s helping them to define and manage the project plan, keeping themselves focused on the goals and how to achieve them.
7. This team needs to get support from the rest of the organization and from management, if they are to succeed in their goal, and implement the change.
8. And in today’s world, with all the complexity, the constant change, the conflicting information, the team and each individual on the team needs to build their confidence.  They have to be sure they are doing the right thing for the organization, the right thing for their team, and for themselves.  And they have to maintain that confidence from developing the plan through implementing it.
9. And if they do all of this, they still are uncertain.  We have to help them deal with that uncertainty and help them have the confidence in moving forward despite that.

They have probably never done this before.  They don’t know how to do it, what to look at, what they need to learn.  All the risks are on them with very little on us.  Buying can be very lonely.  But this, again, is where we can help them.  Moving them forward for the win.

Helping the customer manage through this, helping them understand and build their confidence, helping them managing toward the win—that’s the only way we create greater certainty in our ability to win.

We win only when the customer wins!